Financier and Wife Give $25 Million to Work-Force Development Charity

A roundup of notable gifts compiled by the Chronicle:

Year Up

Bennett and Meg Goodman gave $25 million through their Meg and Bennett Goodman Family Foundation to support scholarships and programming at the workforce-development nonprofit. Of the total, $15 million will pay for new pilot programs, and $10 million will endow the Garrett Moran Scholars, which will provide funding for 40 young adults chosen annually who have shown significant leadership potential. Moran formerly served as the nonprofit’s president and currently serves on its Board of Directors.

The organization provides young adults from underserved backgrounds with training and other resources and connects them to a national network of employers looking for skilled and diverse talent.

Bennett Goodman co-founded Hunter Point Capital, a New York investment firm, and GSO Capital Partners, the credit arm of the Blackstone Group. He was previously managing partner of the Alternative Capital Division of Credit Suisse. Meg Goodman was a banker for 15 years with Bankers Trust Company and Citicorp.

The Goodmans are longtime donors to a range of causes. Last year they donated a collection of important civil rights movement–era photography to Lafayette College, Bennett Goodman’s alma mater. The collection includes more than 1,600 photographs taken by Associated Press photographers such as John Rous, Stephan Shames, and Robert S. Oaks between the 1950s and 1980s.

University of California at Irvine

Henry and Susan Samueli pledged $4 million to the university’s Center for Jewish Studies to match donations from other donors in an effort to expand the study of Jewish and Israeli culture and society and confront the spread of anti-Semitism. For the Samuelis, the study of anti-Semitism is personal: His parents were Holocaust survivors.

“Combating anti-Semitism requires a community effort, and we hope this matching gift will inspire others to join us,” Susan Samueli said in a news release.

Henry Samueli co-founded the semiconductor corporation Broadcom. He also serves as an adjunct professor in the university’s electrical engineering and computer-science department. The Samuelis have given extensively to the university. In 2017, they pledged $200 million to create the Susan & Henry Samueli College of Health Sciences. In addition, they gave $20 million for the Henry Samueli School of Engineering in 1999, and they donated $5.7 million to establish the Susan Samueli Center for Integrative Medicine in 2001.

Muskegon Museum of Art

Steven Alan Bennett and Elaine Melotti Schmidt gave $1.5 million toward a construction project that will double the size of the 110-year-old art museum. The couple also gave the museum their collection of more than 150 paintings by women artists, including works by the 17th-century painter Artemisia Gentileschi and pieces by Mary Cassatt, Elaine de Kooning, and Agnes Martin.

Steven Alan Bennett retired in 2015 as executive vice president and chief legal officer of USAA, a financial-services organization the serves the U.S. military. He previously led the legal departments of Bank One Corporation and Cardinal Health. Elaine Melotti Schmidt is a former educator who specialized in early-childhood education, special education, and teaching English as a second language and at-risk students.

Their gift follows another they gave the museum in 2018 when the couple established the Bennett Prize for Women Figurative Realist Painters, a biennial $50,000 award. They said in a news release that they chose the museum as the host of the prize after holding discussions with multiple museums around the country.

“We appreciated the straightforward and easy-going style of the Muskegon Art Museum and were tired of being condescended to by big art museums who really wanted nothing to do with a figurative art prize,” Schmidt said in a news release.

Concordance

Kenneth and Kathryn Chenault pledged $1 million toward the charity’s fundraising campaign, an effort to bolster its program to help formerly incarcerated people re-enter society. The St. Louis organization plans to expand to 11 additional U.S. cities over the next five years. Its program includes mental- and behavioral-health treatment, substance-use treatment, education and job training, employment, and other services that are critical to reducing recidivism.

Ken Chenault is chairman and a managing director of the New York venture-capital firm General Catalyst and former chairman and CEO of American Express. He is co-chairman of Concordance’s fundraising campaign, which aims to raise $100 million for the expansion effort.

Kathryn Chenault is a lawyer who served as vice president of national, corporate, and foundation support programs for the United Negro College Fund. Earlier in her career, she worked as an attorney at the New York law firm Donovan, Leisure, Newton & Irvine.

Ohio State University

Ryan and Nina Day give $1 million to establish the Nina and Ryan Day Resilience Fund, which will support mental-health research and services at the Wexner Medical Center and College of Medicine. Ryan Day is the university’s head football coach.

He said in a news release that he and his wife understand how important it is to have someone “you can turn to for help and strength in times of difficulty” and that they hope their gift will allow more Ohio State University students to have access to mental-health support. The issue is a personal one for Ryan Day. In 2018, after a recruiting trip to a high school that had experienced multiple recent student suicides, he confronted long-buried anguish over the loss of his father, who died by suicide when Day was 8.

Day held a number of coaching positions before joining the university coaching staff in 2017. He served as the quarterbacks coach for the National Football League teams the Philadelphia Eagles and the San Francisco 49ers in 2015 and 2016, respectively, and as the offensive coordinator for Temple University and Boston College prior to his NFL posts.

University of California at Los Angeles

Ann Daly and John Gustafson gave $1 million to support a new center that will bring together and house all of the basic-needs services the university provides its neediest students. The new center will offer emergency funding, food-security programs, financial-literacy workshops, short-term loans, housing assistance, access to child care, a temporary safe place to sleep for commuters, and other services all under one roof in a more convenient and centralized location on campus. The new center is scheduled to open in the fall in UCLA’s Strathmore Building

Daly is an advisory partner at WndrCo, a venture-capital firm in Los Angeles. She previously served as president and COO of DreamWorks Animation, a studio that produces animated films and television programs. She earned an economic degree from the university in 1979 and currently serves on the UCLA Foundation Board of Directors. John Gustafson is also a UCLA alumnus. He earned a degree in business economics in 1980.

“As former UCLA undergraduates who worked multiple jobs during our college years, we understand the challenges that can arise as students seek to get an education, and the current economic environment has certainly increased the struggle facing some students,” Daly said in a news release.

To learn about other big donations, see our database of gifts of $1 million or more, which is updated regularly.